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So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?
I know Lynch's Dune wasn't perfect. It's profoundly 80's. He's on record at various points in his life saying he hated it, softening to the point where he regrets he didn't have final cut, and softening some more saying he's glad it has some fans.
I think I love how much it leans into the weirdness of Dune, and how utterly alien it all is. I don't even mind that it goes all tell instead of show by just having characters inner monologues going all the damned time. I don't even hate the "creative liberties" that were taken with the weirding way. At least not as much as I used to, since I've seen how much worse current year nonsense can make things than merely goofy.
Admittedly, I'm probably a more casual Dune fan. I think I only read the original 6 books 2 or 3 times, and maybe I'm just dense, but I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.
Lynch's Dune is like a first girlfriend for me, so I judge it by different standards. It was one of the fist science fiction films I saw as a young child, along with Star Wars and bits of the original Star Trek films (I was too scared by those to watch them all the way through until later). Lynch's Dune didn't make a lot of sense to me, but no grown-up films made 100% sense to me at that point, and what I could understand was exciting, inspiring, and mentally stimulating. The weirdness probably helped to make me a sci-fi fan; in particular, of that sort of "alternative societies" and "mythology in SPAAACE" sci-fi. Were it not for the queering of sci-fi, I suspect I'd still be a fan of new sci-fi books; as it is, there is a wealth of stuff from when sci-fi offered ideas that I couldn't find in a SLAC.
I actually wrote entire novellas (30+ pages) in notebooks when I was about 10, which were basically ripoffs of Lynch's Dune ("except mine is on COLD planets... And there are these shadow-aliens from a parallel universe...") which in retrospect is less embarassing when I consider that this was before I knew about fan fiction and that telling your own stories in other people's fictional universes/stories is a perfectly natural, very old way for imagination and fiction writing skills to develop.
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Lynch's Dune was totally whack most of the time and some of the effects haven't aged well (riding the worm??) but there are some really great moments that i feel are missing from the new movies. For me Piter's introduction really sticks in my mind, sampled to great effect in some classic dnb. The bizarreness of it all (the eyebrows, the giant mouth) is really unmatched.
And the aesthetics. Maybe Lynch is responsible for my instinct on this issue (I saw his film before I read the books) but I have always thought of the Dune universe as vivid. Giedi Prime is black and putrid green. The women are beautiful. The Baron is disgusting. The worms are huge and alien. Paul is expressive and vibrant (ok, that really doesn't match the books, but film is a different medium). The spice-coloured eyes are glowing blue.
Also, though Lynch's film misses the moral ambiguity, it works really well as a portrayal of the Dune story as the Fremen themselves might tell it thousands of years later. Paul is a supernatural hero who saves the universe and then instantly brings rain. He understood the power of words, which were literal sound guns! Jamis? Who is Jamis?
It's the same sort of selection and compression that means that our idea of what Moses or Buddha was like could be hilariously different from what a god's eye narrator would tell us.
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I’m kinda with you on Lynch. What I love about the approach he took is that he never really lost sight of Dune as a very distant, very weird future and leaning into it hard. Even the telling parts and voice overs really push the point that this isn’t just like Earth. He fails more because of how stuck he was with the time frame. He only got one movie and had to cover a lot of ground and explain things to the audience at the same time. But I love it for the ambience and the ambition. I loved that he didn’t go straight for the obvious of making the Fremen into I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-Arabs and instead showed them having a unique culture that had echoes of Native American and Mongolian and high tech culture as well. The 2000 miniseries whiffed on exactly that count, and basically turned the Fremen into Muslims with really nothing unique.
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Lynch, I suppose. It's pretty campy but I agree that its commitment to the foreignness of the Duniverse is appreciated.
I don't think it's fair to call him a villain, and I don't think Herbert ever did so (though I could be wrong about that!). I seem to remember Herbert suggesting that Paul is an anti-hero, and that Dune Messiah was intended to bring that out a bit more clearly. Paul is solving some very big problems, but he's doing it by throwing a lot of bodies into the meat grinder of war. Far, far better to be ruled by Paul than by the Harkonnens! And yet. The brutality of nature is one of the biggest themes of the texts, along with the threat of predation. It's a deeply Darwinian story, and these days people are nervous about thinking too hard about Darwinism as it continues to apply to human evolution.
You know, I mentioned it before here, but to me the entire Dune franchise was about the human condition being stretched to a breaking point. About human shaped pegs being hammered into horrifyingly shaped holes not meant for them. But then again, it's been probably 15 years since I last read them. I should probably take them for a spin again.
That's my take too; it's in a random OCB quote: Thou shalt not mutilate the human soul.
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